Les Soirées de Médan,the Franco-Prussian War and Naturalist Group Identity

Abstract

The Franco-Prussian War was not only a watershed in the history of Europe, it also inspired a watershed moment in French literary history: the publication of Les Soirées de Médan in 1880. The short story collection was a central text in framing a Naturalist group identity, but each of its six stories is also a scathing attack on the Franco-Prussian War and on the catastrophic French defeat. It has been argued that the myth surrounding the volume quickly eclipsed the stories themselves, but the volume's publication history shows that some of the contributors wrote their stories before a collective volume was proposed, suggesting that the critique of the war was initially as important as forming literary allegiances. This article examines the book from both angles, as a literary-historical event and as an anti-war tract. The uncomfortable relationship between the two is underscored by the many paratextual and textual absences in Les Soirées de Médan, which simultaneously conceal and draw attention to the war. It will show that the critique of the war of 1870–1871 is a necessary aspect of the public fashioning of Naturalist group identity, but that this public position-taking complicates our understanding of Naturalism as a cohesive literary movement.

The Franco-Prussian War was not only a watershed in the history of Europe, severing Alsace-Lorraine from France, precipitating the unification of Germany, and setting the stage for the apocalyptic events of the First World War. It also inspired a watershed moment in French literary history: the publication of Les Soirées de Médan in 1880 by Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. This short story collection was a foundational text in the framing of Naturalist group literary identity; indeed, it has been argued that ‘Les Soirées de Médan is more a reflection of the outward battle of naturalism than the real battles of the Franco-Prussian War’, ¹ and that the myth surrounding the volume quickly eclipsed the stories themselves. ² In what follows, I examine the collection from both angles, as a literary-historical ‘event’, on the one hand, and as an anti-war tract, on the other; the tension between the two is underscored by the many paratextual and textual absences in Les Soirées de Médan, which simultaneously conceal and draw attention to the war. Ultimately, I hope to show that the critique of the war of 1870–1871 is a necessary aspect of the public fashioning of Naturalist group identity, but that this public position-taking complicates notions of Naturalism as a cohesive literary movement.

I

By the time Les Soirées de Médan was published in April 1880, Naturalism was well on its way to becoming a fact of French literary life, an extension of the Realism that had dominated French prose since Balzac, Duranty and Flaubert. Zola first referred to Naturalist writers as a group in the preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1868), in which he writes of ‘le groupe d’écrivains naturalistes auquel j’ai l’honneur d’appartenir’ (‘the group of Naturalist writers to which I have the honour of belonging’). ³ By 1879, Edmond de Goncourt could write to Gustave Flaubert, mocking Zola's propensity to write about crude subject matter and the popular classes, that he was going to found a new literary movement called ‘le gros-médanisme’, a name that alludes not only to Zola's property, Médan, bought with the proceeds from his commercially successful novels, but also foul language (‘gros mots’). ⁴ In the 1870s, Naturalism was coming to be associated with Zola, who had worked on differentiating the Naturalist aesthetic from Realism through his research into sociological and scientific theories such as those of Hippolyte Taine and Claude Bernard. The series of theoretical writings that Zola published in the 1870s, which included the essays ‘Le Sens du réel’ and ‘La Formule critique appliquée au roman’, ⁵ played no small part in the dissemination of Naturalist ideas, as did, of course, the publication of the first novels of his twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series, beginning with La Fortune des Rougon, which was serialized sporadically during the war of 1870–1871. Zola was not the only contributor to Les Soirées de Médan who had prior publications: Joris-Karl Huysmans had already published his first novel, Marthe: histoire d’une fille (1876), and was working on his second, Les Sœurs Vatard, while Léon Hennique published two novels in 1878 and 1879, La Dévouée and Élisabeth Couronneau.

Furthermore, there was already talk of a Realist-Naturalist school even before Les Soirées de Médan was published. A December 1878 article in Le Gaulois, for example, bears the title ‘Messieurs Zola’ and mentions not only established writers like Flaubert, Goncourt, and Alphonse Daudet, but also future contributors to Les Soirées de Médan: Huysmans, Hennique, Céard, and Alexis. The title of the article in Le Gaulois – ‘Messieurs Zola’ – indicates that there was such a strongly perceived affinity between Zola and the younger authors that they should collectively bear his name. However, the inclusion of established figures of the older generation like Flaubert and Goncourt demonstrates that the distinction between Realism and Naturalism was not entirely clear. The conservative newspaper, Le Figaro, also wrote about the future Soirées de Médan authors as a collective: its October 1879 article, ‘Les Disciples de M. Zola’, mentions these same four men, but also fellow contributor, Guy de Maupassant. As the titles of these articles make clear, there was a focus on the master-pupil relationship between Zola and ‘les Cinq’, and on his role as a leader of a Naturalist group. The fact that the volume of short stories is named after Zola's property in Médan highlights both his central position within the group and his success: the budding authors were rallying around him, both in solidarity with his literary aims and to garner attention for themselves.

If, by 1880, Naturalism was a recognized phenomenon and Zola a successful author, this begs the question why a collection like Les Soirées de Médan was deemed necessary and why its publication was a literary event. Christophe Charle argues that it was a purely commercial decision, designed to use Zola's notoriety to advance the careers of the other contributors. ⁶ This points to the changes underway in the French literary field at the end of the nineteenth century and to the need to situate Les Soirées de Médan within the context of a wider ‘crisis of the novel’ and ‘crisis of Naturalism’ in which emerging and established writers were attempting to position themselves. ⁷ The collection participates in what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the ‘logic of change’, whereby ‘new producer[s]…and a new system of taste’ attempt to displace established artistic models – in this case, asserting difference vis-à-vis Realism in response to changes in the literary and publishing world following the demise of the Second Empire and the advent of the Third Republic.

Les Soirées de Médan was the first (and, in fact, only) collective Naturalist publication. The unsigned preface to the collection, written by either Céard or Zola, ⁸ emphasizes the ties of friendship that united the authors, but mentions little in terms of the content of the stories or the process of creation: ‘Notre seul souci a été d’affirmer publiquement nos véritables amitiés et, en même temps, nos tendances littéraires’ (n.p.; ‘Our only concern was to publicly affirm our genuine friendship and, at the same time, our literary tendencies’). The friendship trope evokes the Republican concept of fraternité and is echoed in an article by Maupassant, published on the day that Les Soirées de Médan was released. Maupassant explains: ‘nous n’avons pas la prétention d’être une école. Nous sommes simplement quelques amis, qu’une admiration commune a fait se rencontrer chez Zola, et qu’ensuite une affinité de tempéraments, des sentiments très semblables sur toutes choses, une même tendance philosophique, ont liés de plus en plus’ (‘We do not claim to be a school. We are simply a few friends, who met through a shared admiration for Zola, and whose affinity of temperament, similar feelings about everything, and shared philosophical tendencies have connected more and more closely’). ⁹ Despite the assertion that the volume was not intended to function as a manifesto of a literary school, this has, in effect, been the role it has played in literary history, although it is questionable whether the ‘school’ ever existed in a meaningful way. ¹⁰

Together with the Trapp dinner in 1877 and the anti-Zola Manifeste des cinq of 1887, the publication of Les Soirées de Médan is held to be a key moment in Naturalist literary history. As David Baguley explains, these ‘three prominent incidents [are] landmark events which contain the potentiality of a convenient historical pattern – an inauguration, a manifesto and a collective attack from a new generation’. ¹¹ What lends this interpretation particular weight is that Les Soirées de Médan is now known largely for its literary-historical significance within the Naturalist movement, rather than for reasons relating to the content of the stories themselves. As Antonia Fonyi points out, this pattern was established very quickly, and readers of the volume today have adopted the interpretation it was given when it was initially published: she argues that the book has been forgotten because ‘le tri de 1880 est encore le nôtre’ (‘we still rely on the triage done in 1880′). ¹² Furthermore, as Baguley's use of the concept of ‘entropy’ in relation to Naturalism makes clear, these largely symbolic events contain the germs of their own destruction. Although Les Soirées de Médan presents a collective front, this unity was fleeting, perhaps illusory. Huysmans published his seminal Decadent novel, À Rebours, in 1884, and the last years of the century were marked by a waxing and waning of literary movements. The Manifeste du symbolisme, for instance, appeared in 1886, and when Jules Huret collected his interviews with contemporary French authors in 1891, he organized them according to the many literary affiliations then operating: Psychologists, Magi, Symbolists and Decadents, Naturalists, Neo-Realists, Parnassians, Independents, and Theorists and Philosophers. ¹³ Given the redrawing of literary borders and the instability of the literary field as different literary actors asserted themselves, it is fitting that the only collective Naturalist publication takes as its subject military events that fractured French national identity, redrew French borders, and pushed France towards democracy. If the fall of France brought about the Third Republic, the Republic brought about a democratic proliferation of literary movements.

Against this background, Maupassant's article, in which he describes long summer days fishing, boating, swimming and shooting at Zola's newly acquired property, contributed to the creation of a ‘Médan myth’ that obscures the importance of the war to their Naturalist position-taking. ¹⁴ In this pastoral setting, the six authors are meant to have spent their evenings telling each other stories, all of which were to retain the theme of the first story to be shared, Zola's ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’, which is set against the backdrop of the Prussian invasion. Maupassant relates that the authors agreed that ‘le cadre choisi par le premier serait conservé par les autres qui y placeraient des aventures différentes’ (‘The background chosen by the first would be retained by the others, who would set different adventures there’). ¹⁵ This account, while bearing little relation to the reality of the genesis of the book, was reinforced by the fact that the book's short preface contains neither information on the stories themselves nor allusion to the conflict, thereby guiding readers towards an interpretation of the collection as a literary manifesto, rather than an indictment of the war. ¹⁶ The unquestionable subversive irony of creating an idealized genesis narrative for a collection that functions in large part as a critique of idealized visions of France's collapse and overthrow, warrants pause. Initially, the war seems of secondary importance.

Accordingly, the reception of the novel in the French press, although far from uniformly negative, followed this cue and focused overwhelmingly on the purpose of the publication – particularly its preface – rather than on its subject matter. La Presse, for example, published an article that applauded the fact that the reading public would have the opportunity to discover Naturalism first-hand. It also draws attention to the internal variety of the collection, tacitly recognizing the inherent heterogeneity of Naturalism: ‘l’idée est excellente: elle permet au public de se rendre compte, d’une part, des tendances générales de l’école naturaliste, d’autre part, et surtout, des divergences particulières et des différences de talent de chacun de ses membres’ (‘The idea is excellent: it allows the public to appreciate, on the one hand, the general tendencies of the Naturalist school, and, on the other, and above all, the particular variations and differences in talent of each one of its members’). ¹⁷

Others were less welcoming. A critic in Le Temps believed that the book was more noteworthy for its preface than its contents, lamenting that ‘par malheur, l’ambition s’arrête précisément au préambule; en dépit du panache dont il est coiffé, le livre est des plus ordinaires’ (‘unfortunately, ambition stops squarely at the preamble; despite the panache with which it is dressed, the book is most unremarkable’). ¹⁸ In Le Figaro, Albert Wolff, an avowed enemy of Naturalism, took this a step further. Without so much as alluding to the theme of war, he dismissed all the stories except Zola's as ‘une série de nouvelles sans importance’ (‘a series of stories of no importance’). Wolff is much more concerned with the preface's apparent call to arms against the literary-critical establishment, of which he is a representative. The preface contains what in retrospect appears to be a fairly predictable preemptive strike: ‘Nous nous attendons à toutes les attaques, à la mauvaise foi et à l’ignorance dont la critique courante nous a déjà donné tant de preuves’ (n.p.; ‘We are ready for all the attacks, the bad faith, and the ignorance that current criticism has already given us so much evidence of’). This is an obvious attempt to stifle critics who had shown themselves unable to understand what the Naturalists were trying to accomplish. Wolff fell into the trap, referring to the authors as a ‘petite bande de présomptueux qui dans une préface d’une rare insolence, jette le gant à la critique’ (‘a presumptuous little bunch, who, in an exceedingly insolent preface, threw the gauntlet down to critics’) because they think that this ‘fera vendre le volume’ (‘will help sell the book’). ¹⁹ For Wolff, the collection is a mere publicity stunt, and because the authors were trying to garner attention and generates sales, it follows, by his logic, that the stories themselves had no merit.

The assessment of Les Soirées de Médan as a manifesto is understandable given the contradictory accounts of its origins, which skirt the substance of the stories. Rather than focus on its pessimistic portrayal of the Franco-Prussian War, critics chose to focus on how the authors intended to transform modern literature. Maupassant's tale of its Decameron-like genesis contradicts the preface's opening statement, ²⁰ which claims that the stories had already been published, and that the authors chose to unite them because they shared a common philosophy: ‘Les nouvelles qui suivent ont été publiées, les unes en France, les autres à l’étranger. Elles nous ont paru procéder d’une idée unique, avoir une même philosophie: nous les réunissons’ (n.p.; ‘Some of the short stories that follow have been published in France, others abroad. They seemed to us to have come from a single idea, to have a common philosophy: we are bringing them together here’). Whether this common philosophy is Naturalism itself or a pessimistic, critical view of the Franco-Prussian War is never clarified, which implies that they were part and parcel of the same outlook. The undeclared subject matter of Les Soirées de Médan implicitly connects the ‘new system of taste’ that the collection exemplifies to the events of 1870–1871. Thus, while Les Soirées de Médan unquestionably functioned as a literary manifesto, part of its originality stems from its ambiguous statement of aims and its silence on its subject matter.

Three of the stories from Les Soirées de Médan had been published before: Zola's ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’ (1877) and Céard's ‘La Saignée’ (1879) were both published in Russia, under different titles (‘Un épisode de l’invasion de 1870’ and ‘L’Armistice’), ²¹ while an earlier version of ‘Sac au dos’ was serialized in the Belgian periodical L’Artiste in 1877. The fact is that the Franco-Prussian War was ripe material for the Médanists, insofar as the events of 1870–1871 were formative. As Paul Bourget explained in an 1885 foreword to Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 1870–1871 was a kind of original sin for the generation that lived through it:

la nouvelle génération a grandi parmi des tragédies sociales inconnues de celle qui la précédait. Nous sommes entrés dans la vie par cette terrible année de la guerre et de la Commune, et cette année terrible n’a pas mutilé que la carte de notre pays, elle n’a pas incendié que les monuments de notre capitale; quelque chose nous en est demeuré, à tous, comme un premier empoisonnement qui nous a laissés plus dépourvus, plus incapables de résister à la maladie intellectuelle où il nous a fallu grandir. ²²

(the new generation grew up amid societal tragedies unknown to the previous generation. We came into life in this terrible year of the war and the Commune, and this terrible year didn’t just mutilate the map of our country, didn’t just set fire to the monuments of our capital; something remained within us all, like an original poisoning that left us more destitute, more incapable of resisting the intellectual disease in which we had to grow up.)

The experience of reading these three stories as stand-alone texts is, however, necessarily different from the experience of reading them as part of a collection, where the force of their joint attack on French political, cultural and literary values and on the French defeat is stronger. ²³ In this regard, the preface to the collection is performative: ²⁴ it creates a unified narrative of Naturalism where one perhaps did not exist, and also brings together a group of anti-war stories that collectively challenge patriotically idealized perceptions of the French defeat. The act of gathering the stories under one cover positions historical events as integral to a literary-historical one, even though comment on the war itself is absent from the authors’ public position-taking on the collection.

II

Whereas Naturalism is a movement that principally concerns the novel (and to a lesser extent the theatre), in this case the public assertion of Naturalist affiliation takes place in the context of a short story collection. This highlights the inherent variety of the Naturalist approach, as the stories are in dialogue with each other. It also anchors the collection within a multivocal democratic context made possible by the new Republic. Featuring prostitutes, students, and generals, priests, millers, and merchants, as well as irresponsible, inexperienced soldiers, the Médan stories present a cross-section of French society. Each story attacks the hypocritical and futile patriotism of the war from a different perspective, while offering no neat solution to the issues engaged.

The collection is presented in a structurally coherent arc, with Zola's opening story describing the anticipation of awaiting an advancing army, and Alexis's closing story, ‘Après la Bataille’ (‘After the Battle’), describing a soldier's journey home following a French defeat. In ‘L’Attaque du moulin’ (‘The Attack on the Mill’), the wedding of the symbolically-named Françoise ends in bloodshed when retreating French troops stage a fruitless defence in an isolated Lorraine village of no strategic importance. The events occur in late August 1870 on the feast of Saint-Louis (a patron saint of France), and Françoise is left to confront the harm caused by Prussian and French bullets, but also by misplaced French triumphalism. In Maupassant's ‘Boule de Suif’, a group of travellers fleeing the Prussian occupation of Rouen is held captive until the eponymous prostitute in their midst gives herself to a Prussian officer. Huysmans's ‘Sac au dos’ (‘Backpack’) is the story of a law student who is conscripted into a chaotic French army, only to be farcically transferred from sickbed to sickbed, until he is discharged in September 1870. Despite his illness, he is more interested in victuals than victory, in the pleasures of prostitutes than the threat of Prussians or the prospect of military glory. In Céard's ‘La Saignée’ (‘Bloodletting’), the weak, prideful General charged with the defence of Paris makes a disastrous military decision on being reunited with his lover, a courtesan trying to retain the reputation she gained during the heyday of the Second Empire. She deems a ‘bloodletting’ necessary to improve French morale, and the story ends on the image of soldiers bleeding out on Mont Valérien. In ‘L’Affaire du Grand 7’, the constant waiting for a battle that never takes place turns the soldiers quasi-feral, so that when one of their own is killed in non-military circumstances, they mutiny and seek revenge. The result is a drunken carnival of destruction that proves that the Prussians are not the only enemy. Finally, ‘Après la bataille’ describes the emotional and physical consequences of a young Breton war widow succouring an impious priest who enlisted in the war only after being suspended from his duties because of his obsession with women.

Revanchist-leaning stories and poems based on the Franco-Prussian War tended to patriotically lament the events, portraying the French defeat in a better light; in Les Soirées de Médan, on the other hand, ‘heroism dies on every page’. ²⁵ In ‘L’Affaire du Grand 7’, for example, the National Guard's only victory is entirely hollow because it is over their own space: when, at the end of the tale, it is announced that ‘la ville appartenait aux soldats’ (p. 253; ‘the city belonged to the soldiers’), it is because, driven by bloodlust, they have destroyed and set fire not only to the bar-brothel where they spend their many idle hours, but to other parts of the city as well. In contrast, texts like Daudet's Contes du lundi – published as a volume in 1873 but printed in newspapers beginning in February 1871 – and the poetry of Paul Déroulède, a founder of the Ligue des patriotes, presented ordinary French citizens as patriotic heroes. ²⁶ In a well-known poem, ‘Le Clairon’, Déroulède portrays a bugler as a ‘vieux brave’, a ‘blessé suprême’ who ‘par un effort suprême’ leads the combat by sounding his horn to the end, not unlike a latter-day Roland. ²⁷ Comparisons with Daudet's Contes du lundi are particularly fruitful, for Daudet belonged to the same literary circles as the Médanists – he was born in the same year as Zola (1840), yet enlisted in the 96^th Battalion of the National Guard and served from September 1870 to April 1871. ²⁸ He thus had similar experiences to the other Médan authors, who were a decade younger and all served, which the myopic Zola was unable to do. ²⁹ Daudet's stories, with titles like ‘L’enfant espion’, ‘Les Paysans à Paris’, ‘Paysages d’insurrection’, ‘La Mort de Chauvin’, and ‘Les Fées de France’, were eminently readable and based on his personal experience of the war. They managed to be simultaneously critical yet infused with a dignified patriotic sadness that belies his latent revanchism. Zola's ‘Causerie littéraire’ of 6 April 1873 makes it clear that he admired Contes du lundi for the tenderness, charm, smiles, and tears that it evoked in readers, ³⁰ but the approach to the war taken in Les Soirées de Médan is critical of the type of patriotism that revanchism promotes. ³¹

There is little of the comfort of Daudet's contes in the tales that make up Les Soirées de Médan. They deal instead with the less noble aspects of the war, and Antonia Fonyi has demonstrated that there is a distinctly Naturalist emphasis on representations of filth and degradation in the sordid details that they contain. There is also an emphasis on waiting, women, and unquenchable appetites: sexuality and consumption are ubiquitous in the stories written by ‘les Cinq’, if not in Zola's. Moreover, except for the siege and bombardment of Paris, which is depicted in Céard's ‘La Saignée’, and the eponymous attack in Zola's contribution, none of the tales describe active engagement or epic acts of patriotic heroism on behalf of the military. Instead, they deal with what takes place away from the battlefront: hypocritical, well-to-do civilians, ‘des honnêtes gens qui ont de la Religion et des Principes’ (p. 66; ‘upstanding people of authority who have both Religion and Principles’), trying to flee the Prussian advance on Rouen (‘Boule de Suif’); bored soldiers being shunted from one town to the next (‘Sac au dos’) or launching a frenzied attack on a brothel in misguided retribution (‘L’Affaire du Grand 7’); a sexual encounter between a widow and a priest in the back of the cart transporting her husband's coffin home for burial (‘Après la bataille’). Indeed, as its title suggests, ‘Après la bataille’ is concerned with the aftermath of battle and the only information about combat that is provided comes from the soldier-priest's fragmented memories, a partial amnesia caused by the shock of a battle that is over by the time the story starts. Even ‘La Saignée’ avoids detailed depiction of acts of war and focuses more on backroom discussions between officers and the disastrous consequences that arise from the (unnamed) military Governor of Paris being in thrall to an aging courtesan who is both debauched and fickle. The stories are marked by inaction and combat almost always takes place off stage or in the distance. In the words of Frederick Brown, the tales ‘eschew martial pageantry for sideshows of one kind or another’. ³² This is an effective means of minimizing any potential acts of heroism on the part of the French: there is no opportunity for glory in the name of la patrie, no place for patriotism as a performance.

The story that most resembles Daudet's contes in tone is undoubtedly ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’. According to Robert Lethbridge, ‘L’Attaque du moulin’ is ‘bathed in an uncomplicated sympathy for innocent victims’. ³³ The tale is set in an isolated village in Lorraine that would seem to exist outside of time were it not for the arrival of the two rival armies. While undoubtedly pessimistic at its conclusion, the critique of the war in ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’ is not as risky (or as risqué) as in the other stories that make up Les Soirées de Médan, or, indeed, as that found in some of Zola's other fiction. Nor is it as anchored in historical fact as La Débâcle (1892). As the penultimate novel in the Rougon-Macquart, La Débâcle bookends the series’ representation of the rise and fall of the Second Empire, which began with the coup d’état of 1851 portrayed in La Fortune des Rougon. While La Débâcle deals explicitly with the Franco-Prussian War and portrays in minute historical detail battles like Sedan and the massacres of the Paris Commune, these are not dealt with in Les Soirées de Médan. In ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’, the idyllic town of Rocreuse is an invention of Zola's – it does not exist. This can be partially attributed to the fact that Zola did not actively serve. By contrast, the other stories are very much based in a specific time and place, and reflect Naturalist concern with documentary realism, with writing texts ‘of observation and analysis’. ³⁴ Indeed, Maupassant, Huysmans and Céard based their stories on lived experience. Maupassant was in the National Guard Supply Corps and took part in the retreat from Rouen in December 1870. He meticulously maps his characters’ journey through Normandy, and they are aware of their progress (or lack thereof) across the countryside. Likewise, the characters in ‘La Saignée’ travel through and observe the streets of Paris and Versailles prior to the calamitous Battle of Buzenval in January 1871. Céard, who lived through the events, was criticized for dealing too closely with them and for not better disguising his portrayal of the commander in charge, General Louis-Jules Trochu (1815–1896). Huysmans’ narrator's journey mirrors his own: Huysmans served in the 6^th Battalion of the Garde mobile de la Seine, was hospitalized, and was discharged on medical grounds in September 1870 to work in the Ministry of War. Readers know exactly where Huysmans' antihero is going as he crisscrosses Northern France in August-September 1870, even if the soldiers themselves have no idea of their destination. Similarly, while Abbé Marty in ‘Après la bataille’ is ‘complètement désorienté’ by ‘tant de marches et de contre-marches’ (p. 259; ‘completely disorientated’ by ‘so many marches and countermarches’), the detail that he is part of Antoine-Alfred Chanzy's forces situates him geographically and historically: Chanzy's forces in the Loire suffered a crucial defeat at Le Mans in January 1871.

Unlike most other stories in Les Soirées de Médan, the tragic events that ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’ relates are not based on any specific historical incident, even if they come to symbolize all that France has lost. Although it is not difficult to imagine the events occurring, ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’ could be describing any war. This lends a certain safe distance to Zola's censure and could explain why the story met with more approval than some of the others in the collection. Jennifer Wolter has rightly observed that this story is, in fact, one of the least typically Naturalist in the volume. ³⁵ Maupassant also seemed to sense this, for he commented privately to Flaubert that there was not a great deal of difference between the way that Zola treated his subject matter and the way in which Daudet or George Sand would have written about the same events: ‘Zola – bien, mais ce sujet aurait pu être traité de la même façon et aussi bien par Mme Sand ou Daudet’ (‘Zola – good, but the topic could have been treated just as well and in the same fashion by Mme Sand or by Daudet’). ³⁶ Indeed, such is the difference in tone between Zola's story and the others in the collection that the earliest English translation of ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’ made significant changes to the dénouement – it removed all traces of irony from the final cry of ‘Victory! Victory!’ by saving both Françoise's father and fiancé from death – and the new conclusion hardly seems out of place if the story is not read in the context of the Prussian invasion, Les Soirées de Médan or Zola's other war stories. ³⁷

The fact that Zola's story opens the collection is significant precisely because it differs so dramatically from the others. The placement of ‘L’Attaque du moulin’ as the first story in the volume reinforces the juxtaposition between the pastoral setting in which the collection is meant to have been born and the destruction, disorganization, suffering and chaos that its stories convey. Just as Les Soirées de Médan is alleged to be the product of summer evenings in the eternal French countryside, so ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’ opens with a description of a prelapsarian world of lush greenery: ‘on se croirait dans quelque parc enchanté’ (p. 4; ‘it would be easy to believe you were in some enchanted park’). It closes upon utter devastation, however: the river is clogged with debris, the mill is in ruins, the sky is an ominous rust colour, and ‘à droite et à gauche, les forêts étaient comme les murailles d’un cirque qui enfermaient les combatants, tandis que les sources, les fontaines et les eaux courantes prenaient des bruits de sanglots, dans la panique de la campagne’ (p. 48; ‘To right and left, the forest ringed in the combatants like the walls of a circus, while the springs, fountains and running waters rang with sobs in the panic of the countryside’). Whatever expectations readers may have had about how the war was going to be portrayed are shattered at the fatal ending of the opening story, which makes it clear that such an imagined France no longer exists, if, indeed, it ever did.

Zola's story acts as a threshold between competing visions of the Franco-Prussian War and competing visions of literature. ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’ gives readers a glimpse of an idealized France and how France will need to be seen henceforth, prefiguring how it will be treated by the Naturalists. The Naturalist experience of the war is more fully described in the five stories that follow, which contain few traces of residual nostalgia, but which must be read in relation to Zola's – the collection's title references Zola's real Médan property, which suggests that the volume is his intellectual ‘property’, too. Indeed, the status of Zola's story relative to the other five raises the question of what precisely Naturalism is, and how it connects to Modernism, since Modernism is, as Toril Moi points out, ‘built on the negation of idealism’. Moi explains:

Idealists […] objected to realism that did not subscribe to idealist aesthetics. This kind of realism came increasingly to be called “naturalism”, and in the 1880s, the question at the heart of the culture wars unleashed by naturalism was precisely whether anti-idealist realism […] could be art. ³⁸

From the perspective of Les Soirées de Médan as a literary manifesto, it makes sense that Zola's story appears first, since he was the perceived leader of the Naturalist movement. Yet, the expectation would be that Zola's story would be the model Naturalist text of the collection, which it is not. The Médan stories seem to negate idealism, but looking forward, we see that Zola's relationship to war and idealism remained complex: according to Nicholas White, La Débâcle ‘marks in Zola's career what could be termed the Idealist turn, a final text after which [Zola] is incapable of writing a trenchant Naturalist novel’. ³⁹ In terms of literary-historical position-taking, therefore, Les Soirées de Médan incarnates Bourdieu's ‘logic of change’ by textually embodying the transformations taking place in the literary field. Zola's text is positioned as the model from which the others deviate, and the pupils out-Naturalist their master by design without undermining Zola's status as leader. The destabilizing depiction of the war is therefore integral to the position-taking within the literary field, even as it disrupts expectations about Naturalism.

III

Privately, the Médanists were open about their critique of the war. Céard, who was an admirer of Camille Lemonnier's 1871 novel Sedan, ⁴⁰ described the originality of their approach in a letter to Théodore Hannon:

le mois de mars nous verra tous apparaître ensemble: Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans, votre serviteur, Hennique et Alexis, réunis en un volume de nouvelles sur la guerre. L’impression générale est que nous allons être vigoureusement empoignés : 1° pour notre groupement, 2° pour les théories peu patriotiques que nous émettons avec un parfait sang-froid. Ça ne ressemble pas à du Paul Déroulède, oh! que non pas. C’est plus réel, par exemple. ⁴¹

(the month of March will see us all appearing together: Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans, yours truly, Hennique, and Alexis, gathered in a volume of short stories about the war. The general impression is that we’re going to be vigourously handled: firstly for our association, and secondly for the not very patriotic theories that we’re putting forward with perfect equanimity. It doesn’t resemble Paul Déroulède, oh, not at all! It's more authentic, for one).

Maupassant expressed a similar opinion in a letter to Flaubert, although he insisted that the Médanists’ perspective was not unpatriotic per se, but simply a more accurate representation of the reality of events: ‘Nous n’avons eu, en faisant ce livre, aucune intention antipatriotique, ni aucune intention quelconque; nous avons voulu seulement tâcher de donner à nos récits une note juste sur la guerre, de les dépouiller du chauvinisme à la Déroulède, de l’enthousiasme faux jugé jusqu’ici nécessaire dans toute narration où se trouvent une culotte rouge et un fusil’ (‘In writing this book, we didn’t have any unpatriotic intention, nor any intention in particular; we only wanted to try to give a fair impression of the war in our narratives, to strip them of chauvinism à la Déroulède, of the false enthusiasm that until this point has been judged necessary in any narrative featuring a pair of red breeches and a gun’). ⁴²

This is a very different perspective than the one Maupassant presented in his article in Le Gaulois. In their public writings about the collection – notably the preface and Maupassant's article, but also Paul Alexis's article on its first anniversary ⁴³ – the contributors downplay their critique of the war; privately, they denounce the chauvinism, the ‘patriotisme exagéré et belliqueux, nationalisme fanatique’ (‘exagerrated and bellicose patriotism, fanatical patriotism’), which had become a lieu de mémoire by 1880. ⁴⁴ In a letter to Théodore Hannon, for example, Huysmans referred to Les Soirées de Médan as a ‘volume […] contre le patriotisme de l’armée’ (‘A book […] against the patriotism of the army’). ⁴⁵ What's more, according to Helen Trudgian, in revising his story, Huysmans removed the more picturesque aspects from the original in order to accentuate his ‘aversion haineuse des dirigeants, de la classe bourgeoise tenue responsible de tout’ (‘hateful aversion to the ruling class, to the bourgeoisie he held responsible for everything’. ⁴⁶ Yet, the authors also chose a Zola-centric title for the volume over the war-centric title suggested by Huysmans: L’Invasion comique. It was not until the re-edition of the collection in 1930 – some fifty years after its initial publication and sixty years after the Franco-Prussian War – that a new preface by Léon Hennique addressed the theme of the volume, and then only in passing: ‘Nous sommes à la table d’Émile Zola, dans Paris, Maupassant, Huysmans, Céard, Alexis et moi, pour changer. On devise à batons rompus; on se met à évoquer la guerre, la fameuse guerre de 70. Plusieurs des nôtres avaient été volontaires ou moblots. –Tiens! tiens! propose Zola, pourquoi ne ferait-on pas un volume là-dessus, un volume de nouvelles?’ (‘We were at Émile Zola's table in Paris for a change, Maupassant, Huysmans, Céard, Alexis, and I. We were making idle conversation; we started to evoke the war, the famous war of ‘70. Many of us had been volunteers or moblots. “Hold on! Hold on!” suggests Zola, “why don’t we write a book about it, a book of short stories?’). ⁴⁷ By this point, the wounds had healed: what had been lost in 1870 was regained in 1918, but the Médanists’ textual and paratextual silences affect our understanding of the war's role in Naturalist group identity. The simultaneous presence and absence of the war has wider repercussions and contributes to what White in his work on La Débâcle refers to as the ‘effacement’ of the 1870–1871 war from collective memory and to its status as a ‘lieu d’oubli’ rather than a ‘lieu de mémoire’, noticeable at a textual level in ‘tension between the depiction and the repression of war’. ⁴⁸

In its portrayal of 1870–1871, the collection's originality stems from its rejection of simplistic, sometimes vengeful and jingoistic, patriotism born of defeat: the stories contain very few moments that lend themselves to feelings of patriotic pride or respect for military authority. That the French will be denied glorious deaths is made abundantly clear in ‘L’Affaire du Grand 7’, in which an officer trying to restore order is shot by one of his own men. He dies with the ‘suprême regret de ne pas être tué à l’ennemi’ (p. 253; ‘supreme regret of not having been killed by the enemy’) and splutters the last words ‘Cochons!… Oh! Les cochons!… Mourir comme ça’ (p. 253; ‘The pigs!… Oh! The pigs!… To die like this’). When it seems that characters’ actions might be heroic, as with Françoise in ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’, their unsuccessful efforts are seldom fuelled by love of the homeland. When Françoise overcomes her fear and attempts to save both her (Belgian) fiancé and her father from execution, her actions have little to do with anti-Prussian sentiment or nationalist fervour, and everything to do with her love for the two men. In the end, her actions are futile. Likewise, any pride felt at Boule de Suif's resistance to the sexual advances of the Prussian officer holding the Rouennais travellers captive is tempered and complicated by the fact that she is a prostitute, making it harder for bourgeois readers to both identify with her and vicariously claim her integrity and moral superiority as their own. As has been repeatedly noted, in ‘Boule de Suif’, the real battle is over the prostitute's body, which comes to represent a stronger, more robust version of France. The war provides the immediate context for the events taking place, but in the end everyone conspires in Boule de Suif's capitulation: she is besieged by monarchists, Bonapartists, republicans, representatives of the church, of the aristocracy, of the government, of the mercantile classes, and metaphorically drowns in ‘le mépris de ces gredins honnêtes’ (p. 104; ‘the disdain of these upstanding scoundrels’) – the intention is obviously to draw parallels with France itself at the fall of the Second Empire. In this story and stories like ‘La Saignée’, there is not one individual to blame, but an entire society and way of life conspiring to bring about the country's defeat. Robert Lethbridge has cogently explained how ‘ascribing military defeat to decadent values rather than inferior generalship, poorer artillery, and anachronistic tactics’ is a ‘moral thesis rather than a political’ one, but as ‘problematic’ as this may be, it is in this convergence of subject matter and literary-historical events that Naturalism launches its only collective publication. ⁴⁹

Naturally, some critics did engage with the subject matter of the collection. Maxime Gaucher, for instance, commented that its philosophy ‘n’est pas celle qui réveille dans les cœurs le patriotisme, les sentiments chevaleresques, les idées de sacrifice et de dévouement au pays’ (‘is not one that fills the heart with patriotism, feelings of chivalry, or ideas of sacrifice and devotion to one's country’). ⁵⁰ This is a fine understatement for a volume in which one of the stories (‘Boule de Suif’) uses ‘La Marseillaise’ – which was reinstated as the French national anthem in 1879 – as an ironic accusatory counterpoint to the self-satisfied hypocrisy of the travellers who betrayed the eponymous prostitute. In his ‘Revue bibliographique’, Philippe Gille failed to see the connection between the pessimistic representation of the war and Naturalist identity, and commented instead that ‘on pourrait s’attendre à quelque chose comme une déclaration de principes littéraires mise en action. Loin de là, les disciples, groupés autour du maître, se sont contentés de raconter de leur mieux une de leurs impressions pendant l’invasion de 1870. Les Prussiens sont les héros de toutes les anecdotes’ (‘One might expect something of a declaration of literary principles put into action. Far from it: the disciples, gathered around the master, contented themselves with recounting to the best of their ability their impressions of the invasion of 1870. The Prussians are the heroes of all the stories.’). ⁵¹ To assert that the Prussians are the heroes is to misread: neither the Prussians nor the French are portrayed in a positive light. That the Prussians were victorious is historical fact, but these stories are specifically about the French, and Gille's assessment demonstrates the extent to which Les Soirées de Médan both refuses portrayals of the French as redeeming themselves either militarily or morally and confounded readers who were looking for a straightforward articulation of the tenets of Naturalism.

The truth is that ‘Sac au dos’, ‘L’Affaire du Grand 7’ and ‘Après la bataille’, for example, do not even contain any Prussian characters, although the Prussians are, as the narrator of ‘L’Affaire du Grand 7’ states, ‘toujours annoncés, jamais en vue’ (p. 234; ‘always expected, never seen’). This is another telling textual absence. There is no ominous Germanic ‘aigle noir ouvrant ses griffes’ (‘black eagle opening its talons’) preying on the soldiers, as there is in Hugo's L’Année terrible. ⁵² ‘Sac au dos’ focuses entirely on the pointless peregrinations of its main character, a young man who is beset by dysentery and is shuffled from one hospice to another without ever going into actual battle. Faced with this scenario, Frédéric Plessis, writing in La Presse, goes so far as to state that since the shameful scenes described in ‘Sac au dos’ are likely an accurate representation of the reality of the situation, it would be best not to describe them at all: ‘Qu’il y ait eu, pendant la guerre, des soldats comme ceux que nous montre M. J.K. Huysmans, je le crois: mais, puisque ces hontes sont celles de la patrie, il serait honnête de les taire’ (‘That there were, during the war, soldiers like the ones that Mr. J.K. Huysmans describes, I’m willing to believe; but, since this shamefulness is the homeland's, it would be decent to conceal it’). ⁵³ Clearly, it was better to ignore what was shameful than to deal with it openly.

If ‘Sac au dos’ is the story most openly critical of the French command, it is partly because its first-person narration removes any filter or pretense at objectivity. The narrator speaks from personal experience and explains, for example, that the Emperor ‘me fit soldat de par la maladresse de sa politique’ (p. 110; ‘made me a soldier through the clumsiness of his politics’). He then goes into detail about lack of direction, false patriotism, and the fact that ‘rien n’était prêt’ (p. 113; ‘nothing was ready’). ‘La Saignée’ is just as critical of the French command, but its criticism is often filtered through Mme de Pahauën, the deeply problematic femme fatale who controls the Governor. In other situations in ‘La Saignée’, voices of displeasure filter through the windows and doors of the Paris Hôtel de Ville; conveniently, these can be shut. Shutting out critique is, however, precisely what Les Soirées de Médan discourages, which is paradoxical given that the authors’ public writings on the collection are silent about its critique of the war. The textual and paratextual gaps in the volume invite discussion and shift focus onto the internal French rather than external Prussian enemy, obliquely drawing attention to another textual absence: the Commune of 1871, when France turned against itself.

According to Christophe Charle, the choice of the Franco-Prussian War as a framework adds to the attraction of Les Soirées de Médan: ‘l’attrait de l’œuvre est renforcé par le choix d’un sujet d’actualité à la mode, la guerre de 1870’ (‘the appeal of the work is reinforced by the topical choice of subject matter: the war of 1870’). ⁵⁴ In other words, it was a marketing tool, and there is no better way to wage a literary war than with a volume about a military war that was still very recent. For Jennifer Wolter, the choice was a matter of expediency: ‘the theme of the Franco-Prussian War was chosen as a matter of convenience to make use of previously published material’. ⁵⁵ Alain Pagès, for his part, calls the choice of subject matter ‘arbitraire’. ⁵⁶ The subject matter may well have been all of these things to one degree or another – in vogue, convenient, and arbitrary – but this does not mean that it was not pertinent to the articulation of Naturalist literary identity. Frederick Brown concurs, at least from the perspective of Zola's interest in the war:

There was nothing fortuitous about the theme of Les Soirées de Médan. War obsessed Zola, and as he made his way through Nana, anticipating the final refrain, “A Berlin!, A Berlin! A Berlin!,” revanchisme, or the cant associated with it, became for him a prime example of the suicidal self-deception to which romanticism lent support. ⁵⁷

In fact, Zola had already tied Naturalism to the French defeat in his 1879 ‘Lettre à la jeunesse’, where he denounces superficial patriotism of the flag-waving and virtue-signalling kind. He advises the new generation that if they want to recover from the defeat of 1870–1871, retake Alsace-Lorraine, and restore France to its glory, they will need to adopt a Naturalist aesthetic that better reflects post-1871 political and cultural reality: ‘Plus de lyrisme, plus de grands mots vides, mais des faits, des documents’ (‘no more lyricism, no more empty words, but facts, documents’). ⁵⁸ Patriotism, it seems, demands Naturalism, which would help purge readers (and France) of the trauma of 1870–1871.

With the 150^th anniversary of the Franco-Prussian War now past, the continued relevance of Les Soirées de Médan as a damning assessment of the events of 1870–1871 needs to be understood, especially given that the type of flag-waving response that its tales discourage had destructive consequences in the build-up to World War I. Les Soirées de Médan's significance as a literary event that interrogates historical events can be felt in its many textual and paratextual absences, which draw attention to tensions within Naturalism and to the need to openly confront the war. The authors reject jingoism and chauvinism and instead provide an eye-opening, if rarely edifying, alternative narrative to whitewashed revanchist interpretations of France's downfall. They sift through the debris of the defeat and seek to transform literature by turning the unheroic and the inglorious into art, a process that is consistent with the principles of Naturalism, which grants itself the right to represent even the most unpleasant of subjects; in this respect, the assertion of a Naturalist group identity is unquestionably bound to the lived and perceived effects of the Franco-Prussian War. In its position-taking and in its status as a short story collection, Les Soirées de Médan also shows that while there may be struggle for dominance within the literary field, in the post-1870 Republican reality, coexistence is key.